J. J. Wetstein, one of Bentley’s assistants, when living in Basel in 1730, published “Prolegomena” to the Text, and in 1751–1752 (at Amsterdam) the text of Stephanus with enlarged Prolegomena and apparatus criticus. His textual views were peculiar; he preferred to follow late MSS. on the ground that all the earlier copies had been contaminated by the Latin—almost reversing the teaching of Bentley. His edition is historically very important as it introduced the system of notation which, in the amplified form given to it by Gregory, is still in general use.
J. A. Bengel, abbot of Alpirspach (a Lutheran community), published in 1734, at Tübingen, an edition of the New Testament which marks the beginning of a new era. For the first time an attempt was made to group the MSS., which were divided into African and Asiatic. The former group contained the few old MSS., the latter the many late MSS., and preference was given to the African. This innovation has been followed by almost all critics since Bengel’s time, and it was developed by Griesbach.
J. J. Griesbach, a pupil at Halle of J. S. Semler (who in 1764 reprinted Wetstein’s Prolegomena, and in comments of his own took over and expounded Bengel’s views), collated many MSS., and distinguished three main groups:—the Alexandrian or Origenian (which roughly corresponded to Bengel’s African), found in ABCL, the Egyptian version and Origen; the Western, found in D and Latin authorities; and the Constantinopolitan (Bengel’s Asiatic), found in the later MSS. and in Byzantine writers. His view was that the last group was the least valuable; but, except when internal evidence forbade (and he thought that it frequently did so), he followed the text found in any two groups against the third. His first edition was published in 1774–1775, his second and improved edition in 1796 (vol. i.) and 1806. For the second edition he had the advantage not merely of his own collection of material (published chiefly in his Symbolae Criticae, 1785–1793), but also of many collations by Birch, Matthaei and Adler, and an edition with new collations by F. K. Alter.
J. L. Hug, Roman Catholic professor of theology at Freiburg, published (Stuttgart and Tübingen) his Einleitung in die Schriften des N. T. (1808); he is chiefly remarkable for the curious way in which he introduced many critical ideas which were not appreciated at the time but have since been revived. He accepted Griesbach’s views as a whole, but starting from the known recensions of the LXX. he identified Griesbach’s Alexandrian text with the work of Hesychius, and the Constantinopolitan with that of Lucian, while he described Griesbach’s Western text as the κοινὴ ἔκδοσις.
J. M. A. Scholz, a pupil of Hug, inspected and partially collated nearly a thousand MSS. and assigned numbers to them which have since been generally adopted. His work is for this reason important, but is unfortunately inaccurate.
K. Lachmann, the famous classical scholar, opened a new era in textual criticism in 1842–1850, in his N.T. Graece et Latine. In this great book a break was made for the first time with the traditional text and the evidence of the late MSS., and an attempt was made to reconstruct the text according to the oldest authorities. This was a great step forward, but unfortunately it was accompanied by a retrogression to the pre-Griesbachian (or rather pre-Bengelian) days; for Lachmann rejected the idea of grouping MSS., and having selected a small number of the oldest authorities undertook always to follow the reading of the majority.
C. Tischendorf, the most famous follower of Lachmann, besides editions of many MSS. and the collation of many more, published between 1841 and 1869–1872 eight editions of the New Testament with full critical notes. The eighth edition, which for the first time contained the readings of א, has not yet been equalled, and together with the Prolegomena, supplied by C. R. Gregory after Tischendorf’s death, is the standard critical edition which is used by scholars all over the world. At the same time it must be admitted that it gradually became antiquated. Fresh collations of MSS., and especially fresh discoveries and investigations into the text of the versions and Fathers, have given much new information which entirely changed the character of the evidence for many readings, and rendered a new edition necessary (see Soden, H. von). As a collector and publisher of evidence Tischendorf was marvellous, but as an editor of the text he added little to the principles of Lachmann, and like Lachmann does not seem to have appreciated the value of the Griesbachian system of grouping MSS.
S. P. Tregelles, an English scholar, like Tischendorf, spent almost his whole life in the collection of material, and published a critical edition, based on the earliest authorities, at intervals between 1857 and 1872. His work was eclipsed by Tischendorf’s, and his critical principles were almost the same as the German scholar’s, so that his work has obtained less recognition than would otherwise have been the case. Tischendorf and Tregelles finished the work which Lachmann began. They finally exploded the pretensions of the Textus Receptus to be the original text; but neither of them gave any explanation of the relations of the later text to the earlier, nor developed Griesbach’s system of dealing with groups of MSS. rather than with single copies.
B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort (commonly quoted as WH), the Cambridge scholars, supplied the deficiencies of Lachmann, and without giving up the advantages of his system, and its development by Tischendorf, brought back the study of the text of the New Testament to the methods of Griesbach. Their great work was published in 1881 under the title of The New Testament in the Original Greek. Their view of the history of the text is that a comparison of the evidence shows that, while we can distinguish more than one type of text, the most clearly discernible of all the varieties is first recognizable in the quotations of Chrysostom, and is preserved in almost all the later MSS. Though found in so great a number of witnesses, this type of text is shown not to be the earliest or best by the evidence of all the oldest MS. versions and Fathers, as well as by internal evidence. Moreover, a comparison with the earlier sources of evidence shows that it was built up out of previously existing texts. This is proved by the “conflations” which are found in it. For instance in Mark ix. 38 the later MSS. read ὃς οὐκ ἀκολουθεῖ ἡμῖν, καὶ ἐκωλύσαμεν αὐτὸν ὄτι οὐκ ἀκολουθεῖ ἡμῖν, a clumsy sentence which is clearly made up out of two earlier readings, καὶ ἐκωλύομεν αὐτὸν ὃτι οὐκ ἠκολούθει ἡμῖν, found in א BCL boh., and ὃς οὐκ ἀκολουθεῖ μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν, καὶ ἐκωλύομεν αὐτόν, found in DX fam.1, fam.13 28 latt. It is impossible, in face of the fact that the evidence of the oldest witnesses of all sorts is constantly opposed to the longer readings, to doubt that WH were right in arguing that these phenomena prove that the later text was made up by a process of revision and conflation of the earlier forms. Influenced by the use of the later text by Chrysostom, WH called it the Syrian or Antiochene text, and refer to the revision which produced it as the Syrian revision. They suggested that it might perhaps be attributed to Lucian, who is known to have made a revision of the text of the LXX. The earlier texts which were used for the Syrian revision may, according to WH, be divided into three:—(1) the Western text, used especially by Latin writers, and found also in cod. Bezae and in Syr C; (2) the Alexandrine text used by Cyril of Alexandria and found especially in CL Ξ 33; and (3) a text which differs from both the above mentioned and is therefore called by WH the Neutral text, found especially in א B and the quotations of Origen. Of these three types WH thought that the Neutral was decidedly the best. The Alexandrian was clearly a literary recension of it, and WH strove to show that the Western was merely due to the non-literary efforts of scribes in other parts to improve the narrative. The only exception which they allowed to this general rule was in the case of certain passages, especially in the last chapters of Luke, where the “Western” authorities omit words which are found in the Neutral and Alexandrian texts. Their reason was that omission seems to be contrary to the genius of the Western text, and that it is therefore probable that these passages represent interpolations made in the text on the Neutral side after the division between it and the Western. They might be called Neutral interpolations, but WH preferred the rather clumsy expression “Western non-interpolations.” Having thus decided that the Neutral text was almost always right, it only remained for WH to choose between the various authorities which preserved this type. They decided that the two best authorities were א and B, and that when these differed the reading of B, except when obviously an accidental blunder, was probably right. The great importance of this work of WH lies in the facts that it not merely condemns but explains the late Antiochene text, and that it attempts to consider in an objective manner all the existing evidence and to explain it historically and genealogically. Opinions differ as to the correctness of the results reached by WH, but there is scarcely room for doubt that as an example of method their work is quite unrivalled at present and is the necessary starting-point for all modern investigations.
Since Westcott and Hort no work of the same importance appeared up till 1909. Various useful texts have been issued, among which those of Nestle (Novum Testamentum Graece, Stuttgart, 1904), based on a comparison of the texts of Tischendorf, WH and Weiss, and of Baljon (Novum Testamentum Graece, Groningen, 1898), are the best. The only serious attempt as yet published to print a complete text independently of other editors is that of B. Weiss (Das Neue Testament, Leipzig, 1894–1900), but the method followed in this is so subjective and pays so little attention to the evidence of the versions that it is not likely to be permanently important. The text reached is not widely different from that of WH. The new work in course of preparation by von Soden at Berlin, which promises to take the place of Tischendorf’s edition, must certainly do this so far as Greek MSS. are concerned, for the whole field has been reinvestigated by a band of assistants who have grouped and collated specimens of all known MSS.
Besides these works the chief efforts of textual critics since WH have been directed towards the elucidation of minor problems, and the promulgation of certain hypotheses to explain the characteristics either of individual MSS. or of groups of MSS. Among these the works of Sanday, Corssen, Wordsworth, White, Burkitt and Harris on the history of the Old Latin and Vulgate, and especially the work of Burkitt on the Old Syriac, have given most light on the subject. These lines of research have been described in the preceding section on the apparatus criticus. Other noteworthy and interesting, though in the end probably less important, work has been done by Blass, Bousset, Schmidtke, Rendel Harris and Chase. The outline of the chief works is as follows:—
F. Blass.—In his various books on the Acts and third gospel Blass has propounded a new theory as to the “Western” text. He was
